Preventing and Responding to Helpdesk Compromise

A number of recent high-profile hacks and breaches have one key thing in common: the IT helpdesk. Although many new and technologically advanced threats have arisen in recent years to challenge cybersecurity professionals, numerous cybercriminals are still operating from a tried and true playbook that leans on social engineering, phishing, and the exploitation of a known vulnerability that exists in almost every organization: the human desire to help.

Read on for a deep dive into this threat vector and the best practices organizations should adopt to avoid being the next name in the news.

Helpdesk compromise refers to a security breach where attackers gain access to internal systems by tricking helpdesk agents into granting access to legitimate accounts. Once the attackers are in, they move laterally through enterprise systems to exfiltrate sensitive data or install ransomware, causing significant harm to the target organization, its day-to-day operations, its profit, and the goodwill and trust of its customers.

Common tactics include:

• Social Engineering & Impersonation: Hackers use SMS phishing, voice calls (vishing), or fake IT support scenarios to harvest credentials, often posing as partner staff, internal helpdesks, or individual employees seeking a password reset.

• SIM Swapping for Credential Takeover: Attacks often begin with coordinated social engineering with mobile service providers to hijack a victim’s phone number, intercepting SMS-based MFA or account recovery flows, which is particularly effective against remote employees or third-party contractors using mobile-based authentication.

• MFA Fatigue & Session Hijacking: Cybercriminals make use of repeated MFA push prompts or token capture to bypass two-factor authentication.

• Compromised VPN & Remote Access Tools: Attackers exploit misconfigured or over-permissioned access to third-party support platforms like Citrix, RDP, or VPNs commonly used by MSPs.

• Privilege Escalation & Lateral Movement: Once inside, hackers move laterally across organizational systems into core infrastructure.

• Abuse of Identity Federation or SSO: Attackers take advantage of loosely governed federated identity relationships, frequently via partners, to reach production systems or subscriber data.

• Ransomware Deployment: Ransomware deployed from compromised accounts cripples operations, and hackers demand targeted organizations pay a significant amount to restore data and systems.

• Data Theft & Exfiltration: Organizational and customer data may be stolen if the ransom is not paid, with a potential for double extortion to further monetize the breach by both encrypting and threatening to release sensitive data.

The FBI recently issued an alert to the airline sector to beware of attacks against the IT helpdesk, but the truth is that this type of cyber incident can happen to any type of organization. Targets of this type of attack have recently included retail, hospitality, finance, insurance, telecommunications, technology, and other sectors. Organizations with large ecosystems of third-party partners and vendors are especially at risk, as security protocols may not be consistent across every organization that forms the ecosystem.

Although these data breaches have far-reaching consequences and spread throughout organizational systems, they often begin with simple, low-tech social engineering techniques. An innocuous phone call is often the first step in a cybercrime that can take down a major company’s operations. Hackers have mastered the art of the social engineering attack, conducting highly effective phishing campaigns to gain access to employee or third-party accounts. Helpdesk technicians are helpful – it is in their title and their job description. Cybercriminals prey on this helpfulness; these hackers know just what to say, and have just enough information about the targets of their impersonation to get the tech on the other end of the line to drop their guard.

It only takes one compromised insider account to create a multi-million dollar cyber incident. Fortunately, there are steps your organization can take to stop this and other insider threats in their tracks.

A helpdesk attack begins with identity compromise – and this means identity security solutions are a powerful tool to stop these attacks before they can cost your organization a fortune.

Start With Preventative Measures

Universal preventative measures can make it much more difficult for hackers to penetrate organizational defenses. The goal is to ensure a helpful call center representative doesn’t make a careless mistake.

• Implement Identity Verification: Identity validation is a critical step in the contact center. Full identity proofing, with selfie capture and government ID verification both subject to a liveness check, makes impersonation nearly impossible. Requiring identity verification before password reset can block most social engineering attempts.

• Consider Voice Verification: Consider enrolling employees with access to key systems in voice verification in the call center. Check for voice liveness to prevent voice cloning deepfakes, and use the live voiceprint as a secure authentication method that is difficult to spoof.

• Upgrade to Verifiable Credentials: If employees must present their verifiable credentials at the point of helpdesk interaction, it achieves the same level of certainty as a full identity proofing with an even quicker experience and a lower cost per interaction.

• Use the Right MFA: Focus on phishing-resistant MFA for all employees, such as biometric authentication compliant with FIDO2 standards, and put real-time risk scoring in place to minimize MFA bombing.

Detect Attacks in Real Time

If an attacker has successfully obtained credentials to log into your systems, using real-time threat intelligence can help your organization spot these criminals before they can do irreparable harm.

• Implement Threat Protection: Real-time threat monitoring that evaluates factors such as IP, device information, geolocation, and user behavior can alert you to a potential account takeover when the hacker attempts to access the compromised account. This allows for immediate mitigation before the attacker can successfully install ransomware or exfiltrate data.

Respond Immediately to Potential Threats

A timely incident response is critical to ensure attackers cannot perform any actions within organizational systems that will lead to outages, data loss, and other unwanted outcomes. Mitigation should be automatic and immediate, and can take several forms.

• Orchestrate Dead Ends for Hackers: Build user journeys that react in real time to detected risk and initiate security measures automatically when something seems wrong.

• Use Strong, Risk-Based Authentication: Choose phishing-resistant MFA methods as outlined above and push for MFA immediately when a threat is detected.

• Create Fine-Grained Authorization Controls: Create fine-grained policies that trigger high assurance security checks when a high-risk action – such as accessing or modifying a core system – is performed.

• When in Doubt, Verify: Automatically request full identity verification, with live selfie capture and government document validation, or verifiable credentials, as high-assurance security measures before a user is permitted to proceed with high-risk actions.

Attacks that originate at the IT helpdesk are devastating and have long-lasting consequences, but they are preventable with the right safeguards in place. At a time when AI continues to make social engineering, phishing, and impersonation easier and more accessible than ever, organizations need to know exactly who their users are, and be certain of their intentions. By focusing on identity assurance not only at the call center, but throughout all internal and third-party systems, organizations can thwart these and other cyberattacks that rely on social engineering, impersonation, and account compromise.